Most conventional detergent compositions contain mixtures of various detersive surfactant components. Commonly encountered surfactant components include various anionic surfactants, especially the alkyl benzene sulfonates, alkyl sulfates, alkyl alkoxy sulfates and various nonionic surfactants, such as alkyl ethoxylates and alkylphenol ethoxylates. Surfactants have found use as detergent components capable of the removal of a wide variety of soils and stains. A consistent effort however is made by detergent manufacturers to improve detersive properties of detergent compositions by providing new and improved surfactants.
Nonionic surfactant systems are known to give excellent cleaning of greasy/oily soils from fabrics. However, the long term whiteness of the fabric washed with such systems is generally unacceptable. Addition of anionic surfactants to such systems inprove the whiteness properties, but generally result in the loss of the desired greasy soil removal benefits.
Surprisingly, it has been found that the present compositions which contain low levels of anionic surfactants, part or all of which is the described dianionic cleaning agent, provide outstanding greasy/oily soil removal and whiteness results.
An advantage of the present invention is therefore the improved cleaning performance of the detergent composition formulated with a mixed surfactant system containing only low levels of anionic surfactants comprising a dianionic surfactant component.